A ost-DADT military?

What social conservatives fear: A military respectful of a gay marriage.

Ketterson sent a copy of the marriage license. That changed everything.

“I was respected,” he said. “From that moment on, I was next of kin. They were amazing.”

A little fast, guys...

GOP already claiming credit for forthcoming economic recovery.

The cost of DADT

In financial terms: About $200 million over 5 years.

So lemme get this right: The GOP was elected to reduce the deficit and cut spending. Among their first acts is to take steps to ensure DADT remains military policy, and to vote to repeal a health care plan which cuts federal spending.

Riiiiight.

Nutters...

Wingnuts confuse closed captions with audience instructions.

If they can't find Obama criticism to use, they'll make some up.

What Its About

Even for a blog like mine, which will be discovered, after my death, with great surprise by people, Michael Chabon's signoff at TNC's guest blogger strikes me as being pitch perfect.

Maybe blogger helps Chabon's writing, too....

Canoing through McDonalds

Flooding in Brisbane, Australia makes it happen. Take a look.

Is it the South? Or the Tea Party? Or both?

Tennessee Tea Party curricula demands: No teaching about minorities which gets in the way of our deifying the Founding Fathers.

Haiti

Haiti in pictures: One year later.

payin the bills...

How to make $10 million, 50 Cent at a time.

Oops. Right wing backpeddle edition.

Stopping violence. By any means necessary.

HT: The Daily What.

In response to the horrible attacks on Christians in Egypt...

In Egypt, calls by Muslims to act as human shields in Christian services.

Any chance the Christianists in the United States would likewise shield their Muslim brothers from attacks? I thought not.

Funny how often Muslims act more Christ-like than US conservative "Christians."

Dems in the US Senate start the process to change filibuster rules

Udall begins the process of changing the rules today.

Three important elements:

-an end to secret "holds"
-a filibuster can only occur after debate begins (in other words, a filibuster cannot be used to prevent debate from beginning)
-the party holding the filibuster needs to actually hold the floor to do so.

Simple but important steps, IMO.

New GOP House: First order of business is to suspend their own budget rule

New GOP House decides to suspend its own spending rules to try to overturn health care.

This is the point at which their talking points clash. Will they work on cutting the deficit? Or will they work on overturning the health care law? they can't have both.

This was a favorite trick of the GOP during the Bush Administration. They put large parts of the "War on Terror" off-budget in order to message the numbers of the federal budget.

Cantor, as usual, looks pretty stupid trying to explain this all away.

The Joy of Stats

Few things on the internet are worth an hour of time at a sitting. This one is. An engaging discussion of the role of statistics.

Yes, sounds exciting! Er, no. But I dare you to give it 5 minutes and then not start putting off whatever you were planning on doing the other 55.